Dreading the Arrival of Daffodils

Most people can't wait for the winter to end, but I sure can. As soon as the winter ends at my house, the gardening begins. Hard-core gardening. X-treme gardening. 24/7 gardening.

For the next six months, all other domestic life stops dead in its tracks and flora mundi take over. Even before the snow has left the ground, my wife starts talking about the delicate crocuses and the prim day lilies, about her earnest hope that an early frost does not wipe out these powerless little shoots whose arrival signifies that spring has arrived and summer cannot be far behind.

But I hate it when the crocuses and the snow drops pop out of the ground, because it means that for the next six months my wife will literally talk about nothing but gardening. I would prefer for Persephone to remain in the Underworld until, say, late July. Maybe late August. No, she should just stay there, period.

Like many men, I pretend to be interested in gardening so that my wife will let me watch baseball. I believe she does the same in reverse. She pretends to know or care what a suicide squeeze is, and I pretend to be able to tell the difference between forsythias and azaleas. One of them, I remember, is yellow, but I can never remember which. I can also never remember whether it is daffodils or bromeliads that deer find distasteful. I know that they like tulips, and I know that they like tomatoes. The same goes for roses, day lilies and hollyhocks—hasta la vista, baby (or perhaps, in this case, hosta la vista).

I do not object to gardens in general or gardening in particular. I have visited Versailles twice and found it very nice. But the people who run Versailles don't have to worry about ravenous, amoral deer or vinyl netting or keeping the garbage men from heaving the plastic recycling bins onto the hollyhocks. They don't have to eat their bananas off-premises to prevent their wives from placing the rotting skins in the stinking, fetid, disgusting compost container under the kitchen sink or the stinking, fetid compost heap out in back of the house. They don't have to worry about passersby filching begonias, Rottweilers doing their business amidst the chrysanthemums, teenagers tossing their beer cans into the petunias, or Range Rovers whipping around the corner and killing my wife while she's pruning the fuchsias. I do.

A couple of years ago, I reluctantly started going on weekend garden tours with my wife. I only did this because my kids are grown up and I can no longer use emergency visits to the circus as an excuse not to go.

I will never forgive them for leaving. Garden tours embarrass me because I am the only person there who doesn't know anything about gardening. I feel like Placido Domingo at the Daytona 500. I feel like a normal, well-adjusted guy at Burning Man. I try to hide behind the topiary and follow the Phils-Nationals game on my Droid, but gardeners run me to earth.

Faux rustics in Tilley hats and women clutching PBS tote-bags who seem to have been weaned in Birkenstock booties will interrogate me about the radiant flora, and I will be completely at sea. What kind of bromeliad is that? Beats me, I thought it was a begonia. Is that Queen Anne's Lace over there? Beats me, I thought it was a begonia. How do you keep the deer from ravaging your tulips? I poke them with sharp, curare-dipped sticks or feed them stale begonias.

Recently I raised the subject of selling our house and downsizing. What I had in mind was a condo in northern Greenland or a town house in Outer Mongolia, where gardens don't do so well and my wife would have to be satisfied with low-maintenance house plants.

Short of that, I hope global warming or whatever has been going on in the atmosphere the past few months coalesces to make next winter last 51 weeks. It would be nice if baseball lasted 51 weeks a year, too. Problem is, they'd have to play in the snow.

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